Film Board

Lonnie Isabel
Founder and Chairman
Lonnie Isabel is a reporter, editor and director of the International Reporting Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former deputy managing editor of Newsday, and was responsible for supervising the national, foreign, state, Washington, health and science staffs. During his 16-year career at the newspaper, Lonnie also served as assistant managing editor, overseeing coverage of the September 11th aftermath and the Iraq War, and as national editor, covering the 2000 presidential campaign and the Oklahoma City bombing. At CUNY, Lonnie started a program that has sent student reporters on internships all over the world from Santiago to Amman, from Johannesburg to Seoul. With the Committee to Protect Journalist, Lonnie also started an International Journalist in Residence program at the school that brings a journalist who has been threatened or harmed in the course of their work in their home countries to the school for one year to study, teach and interact with students and faculty. He has trained journalists in Jordan, India and Germany.

Nathalie Applewhite
Nathalie is managing director of the Pultizer Center on Crisis Reporting, an innovative award-winning non-profit journalism organization based in Washington and dedicated to supporting the independent international journalism that U.S. media organizations are increasingly less able to undertake. She is also a documentary filmmaker, whose film Picture Me an Enemy (2002), about two young women from the former Yugoslavia, was screened nationally and internationally in film festivals and universities. The film was nominated for a regional Emmy award, and won the Best Documentary Award in the Philadelphia Film Festival’s Festival of Independents. She was awarded a Leeway Harmony grant for this work in honor of projects that promote racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance.

Lisa Armstrong
Lisa is an award-winning journalist with credits in several publications, including National Geographic, Parade, In Style, USA Weekend, The Washington Post, Essence, Working Mother, and Ms. She grew up in Nairobi, Kenya and has made frequent trips to Africa in the past couple of years, writing stories mostly about issues affecting women and children. She won an award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors for an article on a rural Kenyan village formed by women who were allegedly raped by British soldiers. She teaches craft of journalism and international reporting at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Kathryn Bonomi
Programming ConsultantKathryn Bonomi is a film programmer specializing in arts- and author-related programs. Through her longstanding affiliation with the Jacob Burns Film Center, she originated two annual series, “FrameWorks: Art on Film,” featuring speakers from the art world and exhibitions, and “Jazz Sessions,” with live performances. In addition she has planned screenings of films by such directors as Ousmane Sembene, Jehain Noujaim, Marcel Ophüls, Zana Briski, Robert Drew, Molly Bingham, and many others, and postfilm discussions on a wide range of political and cultural topics, domestic and international. A partial list includes: the 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, Emmett Till and the early Civil Rights Movement, human rights in Egypt, war reporting in Bosnia and Iraq, the Nazi plunder of Jewish art collections, autism and other medical issues, American conservatism, the Laramie Project, gay marriage, Enron, and the SicilianMafia.

Prue ClarkePrue is an award winning journalist and media educator. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, The Australian and on the BBC, CBC, ABC and NPR. Prue’s reporting has focused on Africa since 2004. She has covered war-torn eastern Congo and AIDS-ravaged communities of Rwanda and Uganda. Prue’s reporting on Liberia’s reconstruction has won the national Edward R. Murrow award for feature reporting and an Amnesty International award. Her reporting on child slaves in Ghana won several awards including the United Nations Gold Medal. Prue is co-founder of New Narratives, a training program for women reporters in Liberia, where women were victimized on an unprecedented scale during the civil war. Prue has been a Visiting Associate Professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism teaching international reporting and radio.

Jesse Hardman
Jesse has worked in public radio for more than a decade, at WBEZ in Chicago and freelancing for shows such as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, and This American Life. He served as a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Lima, Peru. He spent the past year and a half working for the international nonprofit Internews in Sri Lanka, managing a humanitarian information project. He teaches on the broadcast faculty at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Rebecca Leung
Rebecca is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She served as a coordinating producer at CBS News, and developed multimedia packages for 60 Minutes and 48 Hours. Previously, she worked as a senior editor and product manager at TheStreet.com, and as a producer for ABC News and CNET News.com. She also freelanced for the Los Angeles Times and taught journalism at the State University of New York and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As a multimedia consultant, she created a teaching site for “The Authentic Voice,” a book and DVD project based on stories honored by the “Let’s Do It Better” Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The project was published by Columbia University Press and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation. She received her M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

David L. Lewis
David is an independent documentary filmmaker and veteran New York City-based journalist. He spent five years as an associate producer at 60 Minutes for correspondent Ed Bradley; was a political reporter for The New York Daily News; and has worked for Gannett Newspapers, ABC News, and New York 1 News in his varied 25-year career. David teaches craft of journalism at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Louise Lief
Louise has been deputy director of the International Reporting Project since the program to provide U.S. journalists the opportunity to report on critical international issues, was founded in 1998. Previously she was a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report, where she worked for 10 years, primarily covering the State Department and foreign affairs community in Washington. Her duties included overseas reporting for the magazine in Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Before joining the magazine in 1987, she lived in Paris where she was an associate producer/researcher for the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” developing programs and covering events in Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. While in Paris she also worked as a stringer for TIME, then for Newsweek, and was a contributor to The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe Magazine.

Tina Pamintuan
Tina began her career at National Public Radio where her favorite task was writing science and adventure scripts for Morning Edition’s Radio Expeditions. In 2001, she was part of a small team that won a Dupont-Columbia Silver Baton for the yearlong series, The Geographic Century. Tina’s interest in education began ten years ago when she founded Xtreme Youth Zone Media, a documentary training program for teenagers. Her media training projects have received support from organizations, including the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival. As an independent radio producer, her stories have appeared on WAMU’s Latitudes, KCRW’s UnFictional, and American Public Media’s The Story. Her writing has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Humanities, and Bust. She is currently a fellow at the International Center For Journalists. Tina is director of radio projects and initiatives at CUNY’s Graduate School Journalism

Linda ProutLinda is a professor and director of broadcast at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. An accomplished broadcast journalist, Linda is senior producer of a show for CUNY TV on the ethnic media called Independent Sources. She was a writer and producer for PBS and the Bravo Network before joining City College, and has served as station director for Harlem Community Radio. She also has produced award-winning series for television and video including “The Kids’ Chronicle” and “WomanSource.” Two of her programs, “Study with the Best” and “In the Life,” have been nominated for Emmy Awards. Prout has also worked as a reporter for several print publications including Newsday, Newsweek, and the Star-Ledger. A former associate professor at the New School University, Prout is a Fulbright Scholar who has taught broadcast news writing and newsmagazine publication in China. She holds an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and a B.F.A. in Theater from NYU.

Yoruba RichenYoruba is a documentary filmmaker whose directing debut Promised Land, aired on the PBS program POV in July 2010 and has screened at festivals across the globe. It was the winner of the Fledgling Fund award for Social Documentary as well as a recipient of the CPB Diverse Voices co-production grant. Yoruba has been a producer on films that have aired on PBS, HBO and BET. She was also producer at the investigative unit at ABC News as well as a producer for the independent radio and television program Democracy Now. Yoruba teaches international reporting and documentary film at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Sophia Tewa
Sophia graduated from CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2009 concentrating in Broadcast and International Reporting. Her documentary, The People the Rain Forgot, about how climate change and drought have ravaged Kenya, was named Best Documentary Feature at the Winter 2012 Los Angeles Cinema Festival of Hollywood. A native of France and graduate of CUNY’s Lehman College, she has worked with CNN and CBS and teaches multimedia production at the Meridian, Lehman’s student news site.

SNAPSHOTS: 2012 FILM FESTIVAL

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SCHEDULE: CUNY SECOND ANNUAL GLOBAL FILM SERIES

THURSDAY, MARCH 29:
CUNY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
219 W. 40th Street, Third Floor, New York, NY
(between 7th and 8th Avenue)
11:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.
The series kicks off Thursday, March 29, at 11 a.m. at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. 219 W. 40th, with a series of films, including a presentation at 4 p.m. to New York City High School Students, sponsored by the Harnisch Collaborative Future of Journalism Projects.

AT DCTV
87 Lafayette Street
7:00 p.m. RECEPTION

7:30 p.m. LAS ABUELAS DE PLAZA DE MAYO AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY produced by Dr. C.A. Tuggle

8:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. Interview with Dr. C.A. Tuggle, professor and director of the journalism program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

FRIDAY, MARCH 30: CCNY
Grover Engineering School
160 Convent Avenue
6:00 p.m. - 8:45 p.m.
This year the series is expanding to other CUNY campuses with a Friday event at City College featuring “The War We Are Living,” which chronicles the efforts of two Afro-Colombian women who are fighting to stop the government from permitting prospectors to take over their gold-rich traditional lands. The program at CCNY’s Steinman Hall will begin with a reception sponsored by the Chancellor’s Office at 6 p.m., the film and a panel discussion. The producer Oriana Zill, of Women War & Peace, is scheduled to appear, along with Afro-Latina activists. Linda Villarosa, director of CCNY’s Journalism program, will moderate.

SATURDAY, MARCH 31:
CUNY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
219 W. 40th Street, Third Floor, New York, NY
(between 7th and 8th Avenue)
1:30 p.m. - 9 p.m.
An all-day program will include a presentation of short films and panelists from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, one our original partners.